ASH WEDNESDAY Actor Ethan Hawke on the author's life: "For me the tradition of literature, no matter how trashy or compromised, is so appealing and dynamic that seeing my name on the book jacket fills me with a strange concoction of pride and embarrassment." And the critics who took a fork and knife to his debut novel, The Hottest State, aren't going to burst his bubble. But will they make a meal out of Ash Wednesday (Knopf, July), about an AWOL soldier on the lam with his pregnant girlfriend, or eat it up with a spoon? As entertainment writers ponder the delicious possibilities, Hawke promises his follow-up is a more focused effort. "The first time is a lark--like taking a road trip with no destination--just a few laughs," says Hawke. "The second time you should know where you're going." And where he's going is on a 13-city tour, reading at the likes of Central Park's SummerStage and Chicago's Shakespeare Theater. "They're going to be really grand events, on the scale of big summer concerts," promises Knopf publicist Katy Barrett. "This is an actor reading, not just a writer reading."
THE LOVELY BONES A grim back story with a lovely ending. When she was a freshman at Syracuse University, Alice Sebold was raped. She excised those demons in her 1999 memoir, Lucky. "I was always obsessed with the girls who don't survive violent attacks," she says. "Because there was a young woman who was killed exactly where I was raped, I've always felt some bond with that." No surprise then that her first novel, The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, July), is narrated by a murdered girl in heaven. "I'm somebody who believes if you stare really hard into the darkest Mark Rothko paintings, you can come away with some kind of light. The book is meant to be about that." Her publisher has grand hopes for Sebold--a 10-city tour plus a meet-and-greet at Manhattan's Book Expo, a heavily trafficked industry schmoozefest in May. "I don't know what I'll be doing there," laughs Sebold. "I'm telling everybody I'm going to fold chairs and bring Doritos to James Patterson and Anita Shreve."
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE Scholastic published the paperback edition of the third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner of Azkaban, last year on Sept. 11. Now the fourth, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire--which has sold more than 10 million copies in hardcover since July 2000--is scheduled to launch on a day with less grim associations: July 31, the impish wizard's birthday. "We like that day," says Michael Jacobs, senior vice president of trade at Scholastic. "We thought we could make an event out of the birthday and get kids to celebrate." But what would really get kids dancing in the streets is the release of the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Where is it? "There is no release date as yet for Book 5," says a rep for J.K. Rowling's London agent. Hmmm, we're not getting any younger here--and neither is Harry.
THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK There's plenty of hard evidence that The Emperor of Ocean Park, the work of a law professor, is poised to become the biggest book of the summer. Knopf signed first-time novelist Stephen L. Carter--a Yale prof and the author of seven nonfiction books--to a two-book deal worth $4 million. The first printing is a mammoth 500,000 copies. Emperor clocks in at 672 pages, and its plot teems with scandals among high-level attorneys and judges. Just don't call it a legal thriller. "Legal thrillers have to have a courtroom scene, don't they?" says Carter's editor, Robin Desser. "But I think of it as a suspense novel and a thriller and a family saga, and also about race, power, and corruption." The setting swings from the nation's capital to a college town that smells a little like New Haven to a fancy New England island. Naturally, then, Carter's 15-city book tour will include stops at posh summer places. As Desser says, "When you ask an author to go to Martha's Vineyard, he's usually pretty excited."
